Orange Not Black cont'd. . . .

It’s all an illusion of course, the milk & honey-bountiful mythology of a sun drenched, ocean rimmed utopia just north of Mexico. In actuality the most populous state in the union (38.8 million and counting) is a land of parallel universes: the “haves” and those whose job it is to serve them- a multitudinous mulch of mainly Spanish speaking illegal immigrants and their families hustling like crazy to remain. They’re washing the produce and chopping it up in the back of Whole Foods and keeping those hacienda bathrooms spiffy. Honestly, the whole thing makes me nervous, fodder for a revolution and Viva Zapata!

Okay, perhaps I am exaggerating, but if not a bona fide armed revolt, then surely a wagon load of resentment with a little middle class guilt thrown in on the side from those folk neither rich nor poor but intent on saving the world. In truth it’s a jungle of self-absorbed tummy tucks and ubiquitous churches in SoCal, inspired evangelical aphorisms of inanity and itinerant lost souls wandering in and out from other parts of the great land. And just to note, too much sun also has been proven to melt the imagination and dim one’s sense of heightened consciousness, making individuals prone to Camus-like moments where suddenly all they want to do is obliterate the first person they see after walking the beach on an extremely hot day.

Or perhaps my dim, over-analytical east coast view simply has gotten the better of me. Nonetheless, the not so hidden hillside hideaways of SoCal, egregious, stupendous opulence tended to by an underclass of underpaid house cleaners and overworked gardeners sit prominently on crests of potential mudslides in places like Laguna, whose name sounds like “iguana.”  

I’m convinced there are definite underpinnings of Tennessee Williams behind those dreamlike, hillside “cottages” on which the ultra violet light shines so relentlessly; either that, or I’ve read and/or seen far two many mid-twentieth century dramas that reveal the horror of it all and the moral destitution of humankind in general. Perhaps I’ve witnessed too many movies like the Perry Mason episode where the brakes mysteriously give out on a car perilously careening down the Pacific Coast highway. That image combined with the many tales of post modern spiritual destitution and millennium nihilism constitute serious recipes for doubt! Dreamers still may look westward to the land of the golden sun, but the world has changed and have you ever asked yourself why Turgenev is making such a resurgence with book groups these days? Have they even heard of Turgenev in some of those far flung outposts of the empire?

Just to clarify, in truth I’m not a philosopher, a social reformer or latter day suffragette and still have not even acquired one of those bumper stickers that query, “Are you ready for Hillary?” My utopian fantasies always have grappled with animal farm moments of deep cynicism.  Perhaps I overstate the case or simply do not cleave to giant representations of Mickey Mouse and it’s just not my scene there. . . .

So in closing, nothing more to say except th-th-th-that’s all folks!

                                               

                                                               

Orange is Not the New Black

Driving out to the airport on a freezing, rainy March morning under a  sky barely awake via the Grand Central and the infamous Van Wyck, it’s easy to envision a world consisting mainly of Dunkin’ Donuts and Marriotts- a complete study in shades of grey and charcoal in concrete for weary travelers and millennial Willy Lomans.

But grimy and non inspiring as the pathway to the friendly skies may appear along the underside of Queens at six in the morning in the last weeks of winter (and does anyone ever actually use the Van Wyck except for this express purpose???), the area is indisputably located in the shadowy if far flung orbit of the Big Apple, still close enough to catch a whiff.

Arriving in LA six or seven or eight hours later depending on the security lines and the flight tracks and the delays and the cabs and the freeways and the traffic, you find yourself gazing up at those weirdly tall, thirsty and ominously looming palm trees, and suddenly  you’re longing for even those dismal, far edges of the borough boonies, the place where snow removal lags. The weather of course is better in SoCal, but civilization as you once knew it hours earlier  lies somewhere on the other side of the continent, three thousand miles and three time zones away; however at least it's still there and the effects of weather can be highly overrated.

Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. No use trying to weasel out of this. I am decidedly not one of those people who waxes all warm and fuzzy about the west coast vibe, particularly that part of the desert-scape seven hours or so south of the Bay Area. I find the entire golden state  kinda’ lacking in that special, glittery ambience that would make me wanna drop my season tickets to the ABT, sell my apartment on a leafy street a stone’s throw from Gotham and move out there the very next day. The Bay Area doesn’t fare much better in my view either, San Francisco coming off as a rather dinky, unconvincing stage set posing as a real town with its dearth of grown up architecture and micro climates every ten miles or so, most of them damp and windy.  

But I really do draw the line at burritos for breakfast, especially when this delicacy constitutes an airport breakfast at the dismal time warp known as LAX. And frankly, health food concerns aside, if I never see another avocado again it may be too soon- as in, did they really have to plunk the entire contents of a giant puckered Haas, whole, unsliced, unseasoned, unlimed and completely untethered, into the delicate bed of my mesclun salad, somewhat like a softball landing on a bunch of daffodils? I mean, they’re just so cavalier about the whole ubiquitous avocado thing over there in that jumble of freeways and malls, probably ‘cause they’re crazy, mad sick of them too.

How many burritos can you put on the head of a pin, or rather, on the side of a bagel? I wouldn’t actually know as finding an example of that essential New York staple, much less a real live bialy or convincing slice of pizza, becomes a pointless endeavor in the wilds of “OC”- the County of the Oranges an hour south of LA, an hour north of San Diego, and basically in the middle of nowhere, though not that far from Disneyland.

Here are some recent headlines from that dazzling journalistic sharpshooter, the Orange County Register:

-Surf Etiquette 101: Before you hit the waves you need to know these rules. . . .

-Octegenarian Jewel Thief Not Ashamed

-After Some Cry Foul, Dana Point Says No to Backyard Chickens

The first two stories appeared on 4/7and the last on 4/8/15, should you require more detail. . . .

Hell's Kitchen, Part Two

The apartment in which Baba and Zada reside in Hell’s Kitchen, their sanctuary from 1938 Poland alternating for Baba with Miami Beach and upstate New York according to the season, takes up an entire floor through, has both a front and back door and in addition to the aforementioned zillion little rooms contains two never-used fireplaces and two bathrooms. Outside Baba's bedroom window a pink neon sign flashes the word "wine" like mad from the liquor store below, and the bed pillows are plump and silken soft with feathers. The huge table in the front room is filled with small, etched wine glasses with gold rims that sit in tiny, matching saucers, a silver chalice, delicate china, polished candlesticks, and a dazzling, embossed white-on-white tablecloth.  There is a clump of large, aggressive-looking, shiny leaves sprouting from a gigantic rubber plant and a cluster of spiffed up children, loud, fast-talking husbands and wives, cousins and great aunts, all firing off in a couple of languages.

The room is crowded and noisy. The six brothers when bunched together are like a bouquet of unruly, assertive weeds-  they also are opinionated, stubborn, funny and charming pranksters and they all like to flirt and kibbitz. They particularly enjoy labeling themselves and each other for the amusement of the kids and others young at heart as the "rich" uncle, the "smart" uncle, the handsomest, the luckiest, the stupidest and so on.  A few of the uncles are amateur sultans with second and possibly third "wives" stashed away in hidden corners around the city and they've had lots of practice being lovable.

As the Passover story gets underway after the "brucha" or prayer, there are murmurs and surreptitious attempts at conversation and other forms of heresy at the far end of the table, mainly from the women, who are loudly shushed by Zada Jake, aka "the boss" who in turn is backed up by his toady son Sol/Shlomo/Shloimele which in turn causes the other brothers to barely stifle their snickers. The previously pristine table is slowly becoming a weird collage of crumbled matzoh, horse radish splotches and red wine stains with the errant stalk of green celery thrown across it for contrast. Later on in the course of the reading the uncles suddenly will point the children's attention to an open front door as they shake the table from underneath to simulate Elijah’s ghost, then quickly drain the prophet’s filled cup unseen in their annual and futile attempt to scare the daylights out of the more gullible of the kids. When Baba finally serves up the fish after an endless droning of every word of the Hagaddah by Zada at his customary breakneck speed, she leaves the head in tact, eye vacantly gazing back up at the Seder guests.  It is her personal revenge for having to cook for the son's wives. 

Zada keeps half a Pall Mall tucked behind his ear, has an observant, aqua stare and looks like a bald eagle quietly biding his time. Baba has darker blue eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones, leathery Florida skin from way too many unblocked winters, and a raspy voice from chronic bronchitis; she appears tortured but in actuality is kvelling - basking in unmitigated, earned glory- while regarding her sextet of glorious male progeny; she compulsively twists an already ravaged mulch of Kleenex in her hands to dab those cerulean orbs. At the end, after all the matzoh sandwiches, the soup, the matzoh snacks, the turkey, the matzoh crumbling, the compote, and the endless talk stretching into the wee hours, the uncles are drunkenly singsonging about some lost lambs.

Hell's Kitchen

This is a reprint of a piece posted on the Passover holiday-

It was all about names. The newly Americanized family, numbering well over forty by the annual head count at seders, settled in and around the west forties and fifties, a few blocks and a galaxy away from the diamond center and theater district in a slightly more “residential” area of Hell’s Kitchen, speedily dropping the "sky" from their last names and going to synagogue with the actors. It was here that father, previously called Zev and then Alter, afterward Albert and finally Al, and five of the six brothers with all their new names and old accents, began to churn up a contracting business named after my grandfather; and then the youngest boy, Shlomo/Sol/Solly, an alum of Stuyvesant and CCNY barely off the boat, some years later finally taking it upon himself to mishandle the accounting and subsequently spend a memorable Passover stint in prison where the  brothers, including possibly Herschel/Gerschel/George and Avram/Abe plus the bro called simply "Eli" dutifully paid visits. The brothers brought Sol/Solly gefilte fish and unleavened bread so he could partake of the festival of freedom- then after his release word had it he landed a cushy job with the city. . . . 

A much beloved, second-from-youngest brother, darling Dave/David/Duvid/Dov/Duvehla, the very opposite in nature to sassy Shloimeleh/Sol/Solly, had passed on before the unfortunate incarceration incident- an incident by the way which easily could have been avoided and erased with a mere fine by Sol/Solly/Shlomo had he not dissed the judge by stating rather pugnaciously that he only took orders from his rabbi. Dave-Duvehla, though one up from Solly-Shlomo was really the In Residence "baby" of the family as everyone more or less adored him, and why not? He was handsome, and sweet, and fun, and nice, and a talented photographer and also a character from West Side Story with his Puerto Rican amour that he hid from the family until after his death; and he also was vulnerable because along with his godlike qualities he possessed the affliction of the great ones as well- the falling sickness. And it is this from which he died, leaving the earth in his mother's bathtub when barely turned forty.

Everyone on both sides of the family had several names, be it the crazy Hungarians or the ersatz Poles, and figuring out who was who was akin to fielding a Russian novel during the first hundred pages or so. The paternal grandparents from Poland, Leah and Jacob, alternately Laya and Yacov or Lena and Jake, were in essence Baba and Zada. Their rambling front-to-back apartment of a million little rooms was the setting for periodic ceremonial shouting fests among  half a dozen brothers hurling derisive Yiddish nicknames into the air such as "Shluhmeel" and "Putz" and also "Haim Yankel"- this last term indicating some sort of Village Idiot- along with the masterfully sarcastic "hochem" meaning "wise one." The apartment had twelve foot ceilings and plaster walls providing the acoustics. During these shouting events the sibs nervously, loudly and somewhat obsessively cracked walnuts, pecans and filberts scooped up from generous bowls placed strategically along a huge, mahogany table, then threw the shells every which way and downed tiny shots of straight vodka or small glasses of Slivovitz, the deadly eastern European hootch posing as plum brandy, while their lone baby sister, Faygah/Faygala/Florence, looked on somewhat dolefully. They argued about politics and foreign policy, the economy and Israel- a land where another branch of this Polish Jewish “ex-pat” clan already had settled in a much earlier part of the century. And there's a story here too of course.

My paternal great grandmother as it happened had immigrated to Palestine not long after the Balfour Declaration of 1917 along with her several children, now our long lost tribe of cousins in the land of milk and honey. She lit out for Zion early in the Jazz Age, not that the Charleston would have had any measurable effect on a tiny, miserable Polish village beset by pogroms and located on a river called “Bug” perilously near to the Russian border. Great Grandma Miriam supposedly was the genuine article, a centenarian firecracker to the last. She now lies in what I imagine a restless eternity, in her underground bunker on the Mount of Olives. Picturing her in stillness however is impossible, as the real and fabricated stories of her madcap maneuvers still flow through family gatherings like a bottle of Manischewitz during the reading of the Hagaddah. Even her death was attributed to an impulsive caper: flouting the explicit warnings of her children regarding the fragile state of her health and years, and in her late dotage boldly sneaking out on a damp, cool, moonless night to watch a ship stealthily unloading its cargo of illegal immigrants onto the beaches of Tel Aviv under the cover of darkness- in kick ass defiance of British rule before Israel was officially declared a state- at which time the firecracker purportedly caught a cold and met with her maker, going out with a bang as usual. She forever stands as a catalytic figure in a variegated family mythology in the same way that Israel remains both conflicted and storied. . . . 

•